The Cost of Fatherlessness

May 6, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Read this (The Fatherless Generation). It’s a good compendium of many of the social, behavioral, emotional, educational, etc. deficits kids experience correlated with fatherlessness. It’s probably nothing you haven’t seen before, at least piecemeal, but there’s a lot here and it’s well worth brushing up on.

For at least a couple of decades, this type of information has been well known. Way back in 1994 David Blankenhorn forced the world to confront the deep-rooted problems associated with fatherlessness. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead did much the same in her 1993 article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” We should have gotten to work then fixing the problem of fatherlessness. Instead, we did the opposite. We ignored the problem and vilified fathers and men generally for every imaginable slight and error, whether real or not. We still do.